Google revamps Search box with AI, expands inputs worldwide

Google is turning its Search box into an AI front door, rolling out a version that expands for longer prompts and accepts text, images, files, videos and Chrome tabs. The company said the redesign is its biggest change to the Search box in more than 25 years, and that it is live on desktop and mobile in every country and language where AI Mode is available.

At Google I/O on May 19, 2026, Google said Gemini 3.5 Flash is now the default model in AI Mode for users worldwide. The company said AI Mode has passed one billion monthly users, queries have more than doubled every quarter since launch, and Search queries hit an all-time high last quarter. Users can now carry a conversation from AI Overviews into AI Mode, and Google said it is bringing search agents into Search so people can create, customize and manage multiple agents inside the product.

The shift marks a deeper move away from the old keyword box that made Google famous. Sundar Pichai framed the change as part of an “agentic” AI era, one in which Search becomes more conversational and task-oriented. Google’s Search team said the aim is to bring together “the best of web and the best of AI together.” Google has already been nudging search in that direction for about a year through AI Overviews at the top of some results, but the new box pushes that logic into the first step of the search experience itself.

That transition carries consequences well beyond interface design. Critics worry that AI summaries could leave users with fewer links and make it harder to see where information came from, raising questions about provenance and trust. Carolina Milanesi said Google is trying to make its search business richer and more personalized, and that the change could also make shopping easier. Liz Reid said Google has seen users increasingly ask longer, more natural-language questions, and that more conversational queries can help the company tell when someone has moved from researching to buying, a shift that could sharpen ad targeting. Google is betting that the search box can become more than a place to look things up. It wants it to become the place where search, shopping and action now begin.